Grant’s 7-year-old son has gotten into Ancient Greek, of all things. While it’s a joy to teach your kids interesting things, a child’s eagerness to learn also poses a challenge for parents. You don’t want to squelch their curiosity by forcing things too hard. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Encouraging a Love of Learning”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
As a language dude, I’m always excited when my son gets interested in language-y things.
But it was a little taken aback the other day when my son wanted to buy a book about
Greek, ancient Greek.
And then he bought a book of Sophocles’ works in ancient Greek at the bookstore.
Wait a minute.
Your son is seven years old.
He’s seven.
Now, he’s not capable of reading this.
Right.
But he showed an interest in it.
And my wife and I were standing there having this thought that a lot of parents have, which is how do we encourage this without killing it?
Because your instinct is, here, son, here’s everything you need to know on this topic.
Or let me share my textbooks with you.
I’ve got a college professor you need to talk to.
I even said you should talk to Martha because she knows this stuff.
And I’m like, oh, take that back.
Because you’ve got this problem with the kid who’s interested in a topic that you know is beyond their reach.
But you don’t want to tell them that.
Right.
You want to encourage it, but you know that if you give them too much, you’re just going to choke the throttle, basically.
Right.
So what did you do?
Well, we bought him the little book of Sophocles’ work.
Sweet.
And then we bought him a little, you know, ancient Greek dictionary.
This was at the used bookstore, so it was a few dollars.
It didn’t cost very much.
And then we went to the Internet and printed out a couple pages of the Greek letters showing how you pronounce them in English.
Nice, nice.
And he really enjoyed writing them down.
I’m like, oh, look at this letter.
You know, it looks like a P, but it’s not pronounced like a P.
It’s pronounced like an R.
That’s weird.
And we’re like, yeah, that’s really weird.
Oh, that’s cool.
So we went into that.
That’s really cool.
And that’s as far as we took it.
And he’s played with it a little bit then.
So I think we did okay.
But the moment that I wanted to talk about was the moment where you know that your kid should pursue this,
But it’s a mistake for you to tell them everything.
Right.
As a parent, that’s kind of your instinct.
Right.
You don’t want to squelch their curiosity.
But you know what?
I had a similar experience.
I was a little bit older than your son, but I wanted to learn ancient Greek when I was little because, you know, my dad was a minister.
And, of course, he had the New Testament there in ancient Greek.
And I thought, well, that’s cool.
I’ll, you know, I’ll start learning ancient Greek.
And so I was going through his New Testament and just started at the beginning and was transliterating the letters from Greek into English.
And I was so proud of myself that I was doing this.
And then I realized, oh, wait a minute.
It’s not just a matter of transliterating the letters.
It’s a matter of now you have Greek words spelled out in English.
But I still don’t know what the words are.
In some cases, you’re a little closer because they remind you of English words.
Well, I didn’t get very far at all.
And it killed an afternoon.
And then I just thought, I’ll wait till I get to college.
I had a similar experience.
But it was a good experience.
With the Russian alphabet in the back of dictionaries and various texts.
I had a very similar experience where they would have sample passages.
I think it was the Pledge of Allegiance in a lot of languages.
Really?
Is the Pledge of Allegiance in Russian?
Yeah.
Well, that’s what they would do because the idea was to, you know, get all these people who come to the United States to speak the Pledge of Allegiance in their own language.
Oh, okay.
And so I would transliterate just as you did.
And certain words would pop out.
I don’t remember.
Yes, of course.
Oh, that’s almost the same.
The ending’s different, but the basic part of it is the same.
And I was like, oh, this is really complicated and harder than I thought.
I thought it was just a different alphabet, but the words themselves are completely different.
But good that you discovered that on your own.
My son, Guthrie, had a similar experience.
His ardor cooled a bit when he realized that it wasn’t simply a matter of sounds.
He thought it was more like a puzzle than it was a fully formed language.
I’ll bet.
Like a cipher, really.
But he felt respected by his parents.
Yeah.
Right?
And we didn’t swamp him with way too much information.
And it’s likely to come up again.
You know, the same thing happened with Chinese, but there’s no quick entry into Chinese.
And so he didn’t get much further than trying to imitate a few characters for some of his comic books.
Right.
I know every family has this experience.
The kid wants to learn something and their interest far outpaces their aptitude.
Tell us your story.
Was it electronics, engineering, how plants grow, how babies are made?
Or was it languages and books and things like that?
Let us know.
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